Sun Microsystems has canceled its lower-end UltraSparc IIIi+ 'Serrano' processor, choosing instead to focus its priorities on alternatives including its more radical 'Niagara' chip family. Sun had planned to introduce the UltraSparc IIIi+ chips in three servers, the V215, V245 and V445, models that likely will be announced at a Sun event Sept. 13. But the company chose to scrap the chip, John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, said in an interview Thursday.

I just wonder which processor will power the next SPARC based workstation? Certainly not Niagara or APL. So the only choise is UltraIV+, which seems to be quite expensive. There is still lot of software, which demands SPARC processor and is not compiled for Solaris x86. Transitive announced a transition software, which allows SPARC binaries to run on x86 processors, but this program isn't out yet and is not proven. Only if the transition is as smoothly as currently at Apple, then Opteron based workstations will be accepted.